Thank you very much.
I have two points to make. I won't rehash what Dr. Bercuson has so eloquently brought before you in terms of the historical context.
The first one involves the ongoing challenges we face in terms of the ability of a long-term analysis of the evolving nature of the threat. One of the issues, of course, was that many of us who have followed the issues of terrorism and the manner that it is effected on Canada were struck by the ongoing difficulty we faced in even characterizing it when we first having the June 1985 attacks; of course, that was the Air India. Ultimately where this leads us to is this ongoing difficulty, partly because of the very nature of the issue we're looking at—i.e. terrorism and the need for secrecy—but also the fact that we do not have a good infrastructure within Canada that will provide any means of ongoing analysis not only of the current threats but also of the ability to anticipate and try to react to coming threats.
This leads me to my second point. When reading the green paper, one is very struck that almost every scenario and every issue that is being talked about is either about radicalization or about dealing with an individual who obviously is in the context of the current security threat. The issue we have before us is that when we are talking about and looking at the long term, we need to have the ability to not only deal with the type of threats that we are facing today—they are real, and they are dangerous to Canadian security—but we also need to have the capability of anticipating the unanticipatable.
We go through the context of trying to analyze and trying to provide some means of understanding of where the next issue is coming from. One can immediately start thinking of possible scenarios. As I was reading through the green paper, I tried to apply to some of the issues that we're dealing with, such as finance and radicalization. One sees, for example, in the United States some discussions about parts of the population not accepting the forthcoming election results. If this should give a re-rising to the militia movement that Timothy McVeigh was addressing, we of course can have a spillover effect into Canada that will go against the type of issues that we see before the green paper. One could conceive of a renewal of separatism—violent separatism, that is—where in fact we may have to deal with it.
The issue in my mind, going through the green paper, is where does it anticipate the type of threats that are not the immediate? How are we able to look at the issues so that we can say, okay, how can we consider and how can we give rise to this?
A related issue, and one that makes the green paper even more complex, is when we are dealing with state-based terrorism. We know from the various reports about the concerns that exist among some circles in Canada with the Chinese use of cyberterrorism and the issue of how we are able to deal with that. What this raises is another issue within the context of the green paper, and that is, how do we deal with alliances? Within the context of dealing with the issue of some of these suspected Chinese actions, and as we're seeing in the United States, Russian actions, we can only do so in the context of doing so with our allies and friends. This adds a complexity onto dealing with the secrecy; deals with evidence and all of the other issues, but it complicates it even more so.